Sir Richard Branson is an entrepreneur, multi-billionaire, magnate, adventurer and spirited businessman with a Midas touch when it comes to deal-making. His Virgin brand of over 200 companies - Virgin Megastores, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Records, etc - puts him at an estimated worth of over 4 billion pounds (U.S. $7.8 billion).
And yet Branson still finds time to give back. Last year, he announced plans to contribute some $3 billion over the next decade towards development of alterantive energy sources that don't contribute to global warming.
"Our generation has inherited an incredibly beautiful world from our parents and they from their parents," Sir Richard told The New York Times. "It is in our hands whether our children and their children inherit the same world. We must not be the generation responsible for irreversibly damaging the environment."
Branson, born in Surrey, England in the 50's, had trouble with academics due to dyslexia and dropped out of school at age 16. He moved to London and started his first business venture, a magazine called Student. At 17 he started his first charity, The Student Valley Centre.
He then went on to start a mail order record business in the 70's which evolved into a record chain store now known as Virgin Megastores. In the store's early days, however, he opened a recording studio on the grounds allowing fledgling artists such as Mike Oldfield to least out studio time.
Under the Virgin Records label, Oldfield released his first album - Tubular Bells (theme song of the hit film The Exorcist) and Branson signed artists other labels shied away from such as The Sex Pistols, Faust and Culture Club.
In the 80's Branson entered the airline industry and in order to keep his fleet afloat, he sold the Virgin Record label to EMI in the 90's - a sale which reportedly left him in tears. "He hated to leave the industry," one associate told the press.
With the advent of the second millennium, however, Branson began moving full speed ahead into edgier business deals with eco-friendly undertones. Cutting edge business deals included a 2004 announcement of a space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, to license technology for taking paying passengers into suborbital space.
The company plan will offer flights to the public by late 2009 with tickets priced at $200,000.
Along environmental lines, Branson's next venture with the Virgin group was Virgin Fuel, set to respond to global warming and exploit the recent spike in fuel costs by offering a revolutionary, cheaper fuel for automobiles and, in the near future, aircraft.
Branson has stated that he was formerly a global warming skeptic and was influenced in his decision by a breakfast meeting with Al Gore.
In announcing his strategies, Branson said his prime goal is not profiting but financing research on ways to provide energy in a world of growing populations and economies without overheating the planet.
"Some will be profitable, some will not be profitable," he said at a news conference. "But the only way global warming is going to be beaten is to invest in new fuels that can actually replace fossil fuels."
Regarding Branson's continued philanthropy, Kathleen D. McCarthy, director of the Center for the Study of Philanthropy at the City University of New York Graduate Center, said the scale, duration and style of Sir Richard's recent pledges are indicative of a deep shift in the way wealthy people are pursuing a legacy.
"This is all new - the scale, the vision, the techniques and the decentralized nature of it," she said. "Branson is also specifically focusing on an issue that's not being adequately addressed.''
More recently, in February of this year Branson launched the Virgin Health Bank offering parents to be the opportunity to store umbilical cord blood stem cells in private and public stem cell banks after the baby's birth.
Stem cell research has presented as a bio-ethical hotbed of debate because it involves highly pliable, primordial cell matter with a potential for significant application within the medical world.
Also in February, Branson committed to a $25 million prize for reducing greenhouse gases - the Virgin Earth Challenge.
The Challenge will award the $25 million to the first person or organization that comes up with a way of removing one billion metric tons of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for ten years. Challenge judges include Branson, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and British Diplomat Crispin Tickell.
Branson is busy indeed. But where does he get his motivation?
On a visit to his London home a few months ago Al Gore said to Branson: "You are in a position maybe to make a difference. If you can make a giant step forward other people will follow." So Branson is taking the leaps. And if this endeavor is like his other ventures, people will definitely follow.